Dario (2009-11-06 21:26):
Ciao!
This is unrelated to arch, but I wanted to tell this to the list because maybe someone has a clue.
I have recently bought and installed a new sata hard disk. It has a couple of partitions, one with XFS which I use as storage. It generally works fine, but sometimes something happens and it cease to work. I don't know if it's the disc's fault, because at the next restart the problems are gone. It seems that the controller sometimes gets lost. Dmesg says this:
ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 ata4.00: BMDMA stat 0x25 ata4.00: cmd 35/00:20:e7:a0:f1/00:01:04:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 147456 out res 51/84:11:e7:a0:f1/84:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error) ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } ata4.00: error: { ICRC ABRT } ata4: soft resetting link
There's no clever advice I could give you, but I vaguely remember having similar problems and similar logs some time ago (perhaps when kernel 2.6.29 became stable). The block device of my drive used to become inaccessible, but the mounted filesystem continued to work, IIRC. But I was rapidly switching SATA and IDE devices, playing with BIOS settings at that time and eventually (perhaps after a kernel upgrade) the symptoms disappeared... Are you running Linux kernel 2.6.31? -- -- Rogutės Sparnuotos